#splice today

[cherrellerand]

Raising Dion and the Failure of Inclusion Riders

Why didn’t Michael B. Jordan, who lobbied on a platform of “inclusion” for the last two years, allow the space for dark-skinned black actors to win?

In 2017 Netflix announced it ordered a 10-episode season based on the comic and the short trailer, Raising Dion, with the executive producing helmed by Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society. The work gained mainstream attention two years prior after Dennis Liu’s promotional trailer for his comic went viral. It featured the ups and downs of a widowed, single African-American mother (Nicole) raising her son (Dion), who possesses superpowers. For viewers, it was fresh, offering a new twist on the traditional superhero origin story, and telling it through the perspective of a powerless parent who’s already experiencing a more familiar form of “otherness.”

The report also revealed that Liu was signed on to direct the first episode. In a released statement to dedicated fans, Liu spoke on his commitment to diversity and expressed enthusiasm about working with Netflix: “I started this project many years ago because I wanted to see more diverse representation on film and television and I’m excited to partner with Netflix, who I know shares that commitment. More than ever, we need more stories told from different points of view and my hope with Raising Dion is to create a cinematic experience for all families that will lift your spirits and make you laugh and cry.”

The response to the 2015 comic trailer was overwhelmingly positive, with viewers expressing that the comic was an absolute necessity after the repeated film, television, and award show whitewashing failures (Dragonball Z, Avatar: The Last Airbender, #OscarsSoWhite). Liu and the comic’s illustrator Jason Piperberg revealed in an interview with Fusion that the choice to make Nicole and Dion Black was purposeful—recognizing the high demand for diversity in media. They gave viewers a glimpse of a brighter future with bodies of work geared towards representing the marginalized. On March 7th, 2018, Michael B. Jordan announced he’d be adopting an inclusion rider—a condition that would require filmmakers to meet diversity benchmarks for their cast and crew—at his production company Outlier Society Productions. He’s frequently credited for other companies following suit and has created a campaign on the platform of inclusivity.

read more @ Splice Today AN: I wrote a piece about Netflix’s Raising Dion, its colorist casting, and inclusion. It was published by Splice Today.

[slovenlyrecordings]

Listening to Crypt Records' Last of the Garage Punk Unknowns compilations. || Robin Malloy

Dig this real cool article on Crypt Records' "Last of the Garage Punk Unknowns" series in Splice Today.

Grab you a volume or two or all of them right here on LP or CD!

[arcticdementor]

The Woke Mob Strikes Again

The antibodies are doing the opposite of what they were supposed to. || Zack Moore

One of my friends (in a group chat filled with people who can’t express their views publicly for fear of being digitally and economically canceled) sent me an Ian Smith tweet, while I was watching a video regarding how the Democrat Governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, and his administration were stealing Smith’s money via daily fines for keeping his gym open during The Covid Event.

Smith mentioned that he was fined about $15,000 per day for being open; at some point the state went directly into his bank account to seize his assets.

The Woke Mob and the politicians they support have already illustrated they’re willing to restrict access to resources through cancel culture if they don’t agree with you, so we’ve already crossed that line of financial blackmail in this Cold Civil War.

This is just the next phase, an escalation: unjust lawsuits and fines based on laws that make no sense or jurisdiction, pure discrimination, with the state deciding it can seize your assets.

…

Alex Berenson was permanently suspended from Twitter for a tweet tweet  iting an Israeli preprint that shows natural immunity to Covid is far superior to the vaccine’s purported benefits. With the Delta strain, vaccinated people were 13 times as likely to be infected and 27 times more likely to have symptomatic infections as a matched cohort that was previously infected.

That number of 79 percent of vaccinated patients with breakthrough infections being symptomatic seems far, far higher than the percent of symptomatic infections in the original virus we were concerned with. This destroys the narrative that the vaccine reduces your symptoms, which is supposed to be the entire benefit.

As my friend Aimee Terese tweeted, “pump Oxycontin into red states for decades, insist it’s safe and incentivize doctors to hand out like candy, watch & ignore the opioid epidemic it causes, then laugh at residents of same states if they die having expressed any skepticism re: an experimental vaccine from big Pharma.”

Did I mention that the woman at the FDA who approved the Pfizer vaccine was the woman who allowed Purdue Pharma to advertise that addiction to their pharmaceutical heroin was rare? Even The Guardian stood up for the families of addicts when Dr. Janet Woodcock was named acting FDA commissioner in January

The simulation is funny sometimes. A lady named Woodcock fucked an entire generation.

…

The reality is, woke culture allows them to cancel anyone they disagree with, which, considering they’re NPC’s (or Non Player Characters), they get to cancel anyone who might say something provocative. Often, these people typically have a more masculine vibe, hence why they’re capable of standing up and telling the truth when telling the truth gets you in trouble.

As “Benedict Cryptofash” says on Twitter, it’s become obvious that the vaccine isn’t about science, but merely about signaling that you are going along with the narrative:

“Call vaccine mandates what they really are: leftism mandates. Last year, you merely had to affirm Black Lives Matter. This year, you have to receive an experimental injection. Increasingly, you must prove you are a leftist in order to exist.”

You can’t be both thoughtful and still be going along with the Covid Event like it’s not an obviously discriminatory power grab. That would be incongruous. Think about this: We’re apparently in a global pandemic, but professions like teaching and nursing are under threat.

Logically, we can’t both be in a pandemic and be capable of firing nurses based on unproven science. What we’re watching as we see people call for vaccine mandates is the process of cancel culture leaving the online world and become planted in the real world.

People are being put in a position with their employment, where those in power positions can force them to oblige their nonsensical politics or be fired. And, with the fact that you’ll have been warned that you need to get the vaccine as a condition of your employment, that warning may mean that those who don’t comply won’t qualify for the unemployment insurance they’ve been dutifully paying against their will as taxpayers.

This is a demonstrably anti-worker movement being pushed by people who pretend to care about the little guy.

Comply or die.

[malihawrites]

We Thrive in the Gutters and Play with the Taboos

Basking in the depravity and playful perversion of Pasolini. || Maliha Mannan

[malihawrites]

Eating Woke Ice Cream to Stop Racism

Affluent liberals treat politics as aesthetics, disempowering the very people they claim to advocate for. || Maliha Mannan

Article made clickable by the the editor(s) of Splice Today.

[arcticdementor]

Right Wing Nerds vs. the New Common Sense

To the left, the nerd’s ungraceful and sometimes probing utterances have become a major burden. || Dain Fitzgerald

We’re in strange times when the center right is home to intellectually freewheeling nerds just as the left is getting fed up with navel-gazing and hell-bent on epistemic closure.

…

“If I see someone in a Batman t-shirt, I no longer assume they’re a sensitive soul,” laments Jennifer Wright at The New York Times. “Instead, I wonder if they harassed women during Gamergate or hang out on incel message boards talking about how Elliot Rodger was right to kill ‘blonde sorority sluts.’”

…

Nerds are infamous for lacking a certain level of social awareness, being awkward and at odds with common sense and sensibility. And with progressives enjoying their common sense phase—the ability to shape the kind of thing ad-driven corporations want something, as opposed to nothing, to do with—the nerd’s ungraceful and sometimes probing utterances have become a major burden.

…

There’s a growing sense that empiricism, rationalism, evidence and debate are all at odds with the imperatives of the modern left. (In fact they’ve all become tropes on the right, along with the meta-issue of free speech.) Biology has no place in the discussion around trans rights; evidence—and even long-standing notions like “innocent until proven guilty”—are considered an egregious rebuke e.g. to the notion of needing to “listen and believe” a woman’s claims about harassment.

There’s a kind of disrespect to popular sentiment shown when nerds who can’t read a room engage in deconstructing lefty zeitgeist. To even entertain thoughts at odds with progressive common sense is to “normalize” hate.

…

So just how did common sense, and the hostility to interrogating it, become so wedded to progressives? Software engineer Mark Ledwich’s recent piece for Medium is suggestive: Progressives dominate the culture industry, and this has paid handsome memetic dividends.

[hollerpresents]

Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book transcends his own divorce and becomes universal. || Nicky Smith

[splicetoday]

The Comfort in Being Sad

Spencer Madsen’s You Can Make Anything Sad is bleak and hysterically funny.